Sunday, June 15, 2014



Angry villagers warn of riots unless police act on Gypsies: Residents say they will take law into their own hands if authorities do not take action over anti-social behaviour

Angry villagers yesterday said riots could break out if police do not deal with hundreds of Roma immigrants who they claim have ruined their community.  Residents of Hexthorpe, South Yorkshire, said people would take the law into their own hands unless the authorities step in to combat anti-social behaviour.

At a public meeting yesterday, emotions ran high as 120 locals confronted police and council officials.

Hexthorpe has a population of 3,300 and 500 Roma residents, most of whom are said to have arrived since January when entry rules to the UK were relaxed.

Villagers claim Roma groups are fly-tipping and leaving litter in the streets. They say they make so much noise at night that elderly residents have to sleep with ear plugs, while others are scared to go outside.

Paul Adams, 44, who works in advertising, said: ‘They don’t care about the village or our community. All they are here for is the benefits.

‘They are here to play the system. They are loud, aggressive and intimidating. They gather in groups in the park and on the streets. They’ve attacked people, threatened people. People are intimidated just leaving the house.

‘They throw rubbish everywhere, literally out of their windows into their garden, in the knowledge someone from the council will have to clear it up. It is degrading for the street cleaners to have to be treated that way. What these people need is educating in how to be part of the community.’

He said the problems had hit local house prices too warning: ‘It will come to a point where blood will be spilt if things don’t improve.’ 

Grandmother Elizabeth Boardman, a widow and former lollipop lady, said she had lived in the village for 30 years and was shocked by the sudden change.

She said: ‘Now I wouldn’t walk down the road on my own because there are groups of them everywhere. I’m scared to pass them, they make me feel intimidated and shaken.  'I try to ignore them but you get scared they are going to hit out at you. 

Her daughter, mother-of-four, Michele Boardman, 44, who is a full time carer to a disabled son said: ‘A Roma man threatened to kill my daughters and was holding a knife as they walked home one night.  'The police haven’t taken statements yet and the incident happened in April. They don’t care.

‘We just want to be able to provide a happy and safe environment to pass onto our children and the future generations. The kids can’t understand why they can’t go and play in the park any more. It’s just not safe for them.

‘The police need to be firmer with them and act now or there will be riots here like there were eight years ago when Iraqi, Kosovans and English clashed. These people need to learn to respect the area they live in and the people they are living with.’

One angry resident told the police officers at the meeting: ‘We feel as though you are scared of them and it’s to hell with the British. We’ve lost faith in you. This is our village, it’s time you got off your backsides and start doing something.’

Another resident said she had been warned to take down England flags she had put up outside her house for the World Cup bid, for fear of reprisals from the Roma community.

A specialist community police team has been drafted in to prevent clashes between hundreds of Roma Slovak migrants and local residents upset at their ‘anti-social behaviour’ in the Page Hall area of Sheffield.

A package of measures has been introduced in a bid to calm tension and the police team is being taught their language to engage with the migrants directly rather than work through interpreters.

They are patrolling the streets seven days a week and have a permanent base in the area. The South Yorkshire Police team has been tasked with helping agencies resolve issues and problems.

Inspector Chris Lewis, who is in charge of the team, said: ‘Everything is about raising standards - improving housing, cleaning up the streets, creating more open space, providing more recreational opportunities - helping people to take pride in the area.’

Last year local Labour MP David Blunkett warned that tensions between residents and Roma migrants could escalate into violence if the problem wasn’t tackled effectively.

SOURCE






The 'Transgender Tipping Point' to Censorship

Now that our cultural elites feel they have sufficiently educated the public on the virtues of gays and lesbians, it's time to drill down to the next level. Here comes transgenderism.

Time magazine placed "Orange Is the New Black" star Laverne Cox (born Charles Cox) on the cover as the face of "The Transgender Tipping Point: America's Next Civil Rights Frontier."

Cox wrote on Facebook that the Time cover was a wonderful present on her birthday, and "I realize this is way bigger than me and about a tipping point in our nation's history where it is no longer acceptable for trans lives to be stigmatized, ridiculed, criminalized and disregarded."

Beware of the words "tipping point." That means Americans will no longer be allowed to express dissent, moral or otherwise, about the choice to discard the oppressive "gender binary" and be whichever blend of genders you choose. Disagree, and you "stigmatize" and "dehumanize" people. You deny them "civil rights." You "criminalize" the innocent.

Washington Post culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg celebrated this just like Time's helpful 1997 "Yep, I'm Gay" cover for Ellen DeGeneres. "Cox is helping viewers connect a set of issues that might have been abstract to them with the lived experience of someone they admire."

Or as NPR reporter Neda Ulaby instructed in a glowing profile of Cox, her women's-prison drama "'Orange Is the New Black' has won a Peabody for illuminating people too-often dehumanized by their incarceration or their perceived gender difference."

Once again, the show laughably calling itself "All Things Considered" kept its LGBT propaganda unfettered by any consideration of a socially conservative critique.

In response to Time magazine, National Review's Kevin Williamson wrote a column with the apparently inflammatory title "Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman."

Not only did Williamson strike a blow for reality, he dared to write, "The mass delusion that we are inculcating on the question of transgendered people ... would impose on society at large an obligation — possibly a legal obligation under civil-rights law, one that already is emerging — to treat delusion as fact, or at the very least to agree to make subjective impressions superordinate to biological fact in matters both public and private."

The Chicago Sun-Times reprinted this, and then the censorship group with the Orwellian name GLAAD cranked up its outrage. The intolerants forced the Sun-Times to banish the article from its website and confess obsequiously, "Upon further consideration, we concluded the essay did not include some key facts and its overall tone was not consistent with what we seek to publish."

GLAAD's chief whip-cracker Sarah Kate Ellis insisted that stating Cox was not a woman was "ugly and insulting propaganda," and "dangerous to readers' understanding of who transgender people are." Biologically sound dissent is not to be allowed. "These harmful messages about the validity of transgender identity have no place in a credible mainstream publication."

For the full nuttiness of today's gender-bending left, consider GLAAD's conclusion: "Kevin D. Williamson is not the arbiter of who is a woman, nor is the Chicago Sun-Times. It is beneath any reputable national journalistic outlet to reprint such dangerous and false rhetoric."

Don't look at your genitals. Truth is falsehood, and falsehood truth.

GLAAD also forced the firing of a Rochester, New York, radio-show duo who mocked that city's decision to use tax dollars to fund "gender reassignment surgery" for its transgender bureaucrats. The station owners at Entercom Communications apologized profusely: "Their hateful comments against the transgender community do not represent our station or our company."

GLAAD is rising, and freedom of speech in America is dying. Everyone must promote only the glorious fluidity of gender narrative.

SOURCE





The Neuer Affair

In the past few weeks, Hillel Neuer, the executive director of the watchdog organization UNWatch, has become the persona non grata at the recently overhauled UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. At the Council’s fourth session in late March, Neuer delivered a speech that so infuriated Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba that it was stricken from the official UN record. What could Neuer have said to provoke such censure?

Beginning his speech by invoking the legacy of the Human Rights Commission’s founders, a group of five that included Eleanor Roosevelt and Réné Cassin, Neuer asked what had become of “their noble dream.” Three minutes later he delivered the verdict: “With terrible lies and moral inversion, it is being turned into a nightmare.”

In an all-but-extinct display of candor on the banks of Lake Geneva, Neuer outlined how and why the Council has gone so wrong. Under the disingenuous guise of protecting Palestinian rights, he argued, the representatives have avoided confronting their countries’ own sins. The result? Millions of human rights violators in 191 countries have been granted almost total impunity. “The racist murderers and rapists of Darfur women tell us they care about the rights of Palestinian women; the occupiers of Tibet care about the occupied; and the butchers of Muslims in Chechnya care about Muslims,” said Neuer. “But do these self-proclaimed defenders truly care about Palestinian rights?”

In the last several months, Neuer explained, more than 130 Palestinians civilians were killed in skirmishes between Hamas and Fatah, three times the combined total that lead to special sessions of the Human Rights Council in July and November. “Meanwhile, the champions of Palestinian rights — Ahmadinejad, Assad, Khaddafi, John Dugard — said nothing.” When 3- year-old boy Salam Balousha and his two brothers were murdered by Hamas gunmen, the Council “chose silence,” said Neuer. Why? Because, Neuer asserted, despite their never-ending rhetoric about defending Palestinian rights, the members of the Council do not really care about human rights: they care about vilifying Israel.

Watching this speech via YouTube (it has been viewed at least 200,000 times), one can see the rage building within Mexican Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba. For the first time, de Alba, his arms tightly crossed, did not express the token thanks for a representative’s remarks. “I am sorry that I’m not in a position to thank you for your statement. I should mention that I will not tolerate any similar statements in the Council. The way in which members of this Council were referred to…is inadmissible.” De Alba added that any future statements made “in similar tones” would be prohibited.

For de Alba, the word “inadmissible” was not empty rhetoric. The Council keeps a de facto record— Ohchr.org—which offers full-text versions of all speeches delivered to the Council. Neuer’s speech was never posted on the site.

If the Council regularly censured speeches it considered undiplomatic, this incident might not be worthy of attention. But even the briefest glance at recent statements confirms de Alba’s pointed selectivity. At the Council’s sessions in the fall and winter of 2006, it approved a number of egregious remarks.

Cuban Ambassador Juan Antonio Fernadez Palacious, who upon receiving a report documenting human rights abuses in Cuba, said, “This libelous report does not deserve any respect or credibility. We will send it to the same place that we have sent all previous reports: the paper-recycling bin.” This earned the Council’s “thanks.”

Iranian ambassador Alireza Moayer, who penned a letter that called the Holocaust a “historical claim” and suggested that there are “serious opposing ideas over the issue” was given the Council’s tacit approval when it decided to circulate it.

Nigerian Ambassador Joseph Ayalogu’s speech on stoning as an appropriate punishment for homosexuality, rather than a human rights violation, also earned the Council’s “thanks.”

In each of these outrageous cases,the Council president formally, reliably, extended his gratitude. Why the difference in Neuer’s case? Unlike the comments above, which attack human rights (the one thing the Council is designed to defend), Neuer’s comments attacked the Council itself— unthinkable. They attacked the hypocrisy that has turned the Council into a farce.

That the UN Human Rights Council struck Neuer’s speech from the record but admitted, even thanked, speakers who brazenly called for the resignation of council representatives, spouted justifications for the killing of gays, and denied the Holocaust seems a newsworthy event in its own right.

For some, it was. The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial titled “Your UN at Work,” that compared the Council’s disregard of actual human rights violations to a squid discharging its ink. The New York Sun lauded the speech as well, calling it a “diplomatic moment to remember.” “Newspapermen have to have strong stomachs,” the Sun said, “but it’s nothing compared to what he needs to sit through these sessions.”

But it’s no surprise that Neuer’s speech drew cheers from conservative sources—they are the usual suspects. What’s distressing is the deafening silence on the part of those on the left who still claim to give a damn. It seems that issues of building a strong international community, free expression, human rights—causes that the American left has historically championed—are being ignored by left-wingers out of fear that they might be considered handmaidens of a “neoconservative” agenda. God forbid.

To be sure, the fear of being politically branded or, worse, tarnished, can be paralyzing. But such partisan fears are a lame excuse for ignoring Neuer’s censure, and more broadly, for withholding criticism about the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking Israel. Those on the left seem worried about the implication of criticizing the UN’s disproportionate focus on Israel. But this is a false fear. Criticism of the Council’s fixation on Israel is not equivalent to supporting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Indeed, such criticism should not be seen as doing the bidding of Israel, but as advocating action on far graver human rights violations that are currently ignored or underplayed on account of too much energy spent attacking Israel. It is for this reason that the left must speak up.

There is a lot about which the left can speak up. Between 2003 and 2007, the UN at large took 501 actions (resolutions, decisions, reports, cases, letters, and visits) on Israel and 220 on Sudan. This year alone, Israel has received 135 actions, while Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have received 69 and 40, respectively. Last year, at the Human Rights Council, Israel was top on the list with 39 actions, the US pulled in at second with 29, while Cote D’Ivoire had 9. This year, 15 actions have been taken on Israel, while Sudan, whose government has condoned (or at least failed to stem) the murder of at least 200,000 in an ongoing genocide, has received only 9 actions.

Yet some among the left’s ranks don’t see this dramatically disproportionate focus on Israel as a problem. Because Israel is a democracy, some argue, it is rightfully held to higher standards. This argument is premised on the assumption that Israel’s status as a democracy would lead it to answer to criticism that closed societies would simply ignore. But this argument ends up mandating avoiding the worst human rights violations: should the Council ignore genocide simply because it occurs in an undemocratic state?

“The UN charter claims that it gives equal treatment to all nations large and small,” Neuer said. Its specific mission is to be impartial and objective and so “singling out Israel” constitutes, by mere definition, “an egregious breach.”

Another argument that could conceivably explain the left’s silence is a case of mistaken idealism. Perhaps those who still hold out hope that the Council will act as an effective institution hesitate to lend credence to voices refuting that hope. And yet, at its core, the silence from the left represents cynicism rather than idealism. Stories like the Neuer speech are ignored because they no longer seem interesting or new to readers. As Neuer quips: “UN condemns Israel—yawn.”

He’s right. Indeed, searches through the archives of the New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and The American Prospect about Neuer’s censure produced zero hits. Pointing out bias against Israel is passé, especially when it comes from a guy named Hillel. Presumably the left still abides by the basic calculus that genocide is worse that occupation. If so, ignoring the substance of Neuer’s message is a luxury that victims in the Congo and Cote D’Ivoire can no longer afford.

SOURCE






Study Finds Women Don't Belong in Combat

A new book sums up 13 years of research on female participation in IDF combat units and declares the feminist experiment in the Israeli military a failure. “Lochamot Betzahal” by Col. (res.) Raza Sagi, a former infantry regiment commander, points to high rates of serious injury among women serving in combat units, and to involvement of radical political groups behind the scenes of the campaign for combat service by women.

The book's name is a Hebrew play on words that means both "female combat soldiers in the IDF” and “women fighting the IDF.”

"The study found that a particularly high percentage of women who served in combat roles suffered physical harm during their service and will suffer for the rest of their lives from ruptured discs, stress fractures in the pelvis, uterine prolapse and more,” Sagi told Maariv/NRG.

While men also suffer injuries during their military service, he said, studies prove that the female rate of injury is much higher and that the seriousness of the average injury is greater, with entire platoons sometimes unable to function because of the physical state of the female soldiers. The injuries referred to are incurred in training and routine deployment – not actual combat.

"The idea that there is no difference between men and women in the army is a ridiculous one that has been disproved in all of the world's militaries,” Sagi insisted. “One cannot defeat evolution. In days in which a meaningful reduction of the defense budget is required – there is no doubt that the matter of placing women in combat roles requires reassessment.”

"People will read the book and discover that they have been misled in everything pertaining to women's service in the military,” he predicted. “The integration of women in the army has not succeeded, but everyone keeps shouting at us, that we must open before women the remaining units that have not yet been opened to them. I do not know what will help people understand that this is a serious mistake.”

Sagi added that the elements that peddle the agenda of women combat operate “like cancerous cells” and ascribe to radical political agendas. “It is difficult to explain how, of all women, it is specifically those with an agenda opposed to IDF combat soldiers, are the ones guiding the Chief of Staff's Advisor on Women's Issues, and why anyone ever listened to them.”

The book describes ludicrous measures by which women's lesser suitabilty for combat roles is masked. These include lowering the bar of requirements for women wishing to enter combat units, placing benches next to walls that trainees jump over (only for the women to use), running laps in circles (instead of straight-line runs from point A to point B) to make it less obvious that the women are lagging behind the men, and more.

The IDF told Maariv/NRG that Sagi's claims are “completely baseless” and that women's integration into combat units has been a success. “Female combat soldiers are dealt with in a supervised manner, which takes into account their medical, physiological and social needs,” the army said.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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